The Winter 2024 issue of Illinois Alumni magazines featured an interview with philosophy professor Jochen Bojanowski. Read the interview below and check out the full issue here.

Philosophy professor Jochen Bojanowski on luck that’s unjust and how to “leave your own mind”, as told to Mary Timmins

I teach an introduction to to Ethics Course, PHIL 104. It’s an advanced composition course that fulfills a general education requirement. I get a lot of students who are not philosophy majors. It is quite a challenge to introduce them to the discipline and show them that there’s a point to doing what we do.

Many people come into philosophy thinking that it’s a debating society. What I try to make clear is that it’s more of a conversation. People think of an argument as being like a soccer game or a football game where they have to win. I try to create an atmosphere in the classroom where we are thinking together, where we are trying to figure out what is true and right and correct, rather than who sounds most convincing. Advertising and sports culture, in my view, are opponents to philosophy.

The capstone course for our undergraduate philosophy majors is capped at 15 students. The final project is a podcast. The students read someone’s research on an issue that they’re excited about, and they write a script where they ask questions and anticipate the researcher’s answers. Then they write an email to that researcher and say, “Would you be willing to talk to me over Zoom or in person?” I’ve had some amazing results—really beautiful podcasts. It’s just incredible, the quality that the undergraduate students can produce.

In my course on distributive justice, one of the most interesting claims is that we don’t deserve our starting place in society or our genetic endowments. Students resist this. They ask, “Are you saying, Jochen, that we should all be equal? Wouldn’t that be a terrible society in which we are all the same?” And I’m not saying anything like that. I’m saying that if our benefits are distributed in such a way that people are better off just because they got lucky, that’s problematic. Should the economy be set up so that people who’ve had good luck are extremely wealthy and people who’ve had bad luck are not? That seems clearly unjust.

When I teach the history of philosophy, I’m reminded of how people take trips to islands and countries that are far away in order to have cultural experiences. I think you can also do this by reading old books. In class, I ask students to read a paragraph from [German philosopher Immanuel] Kant, for example, and say in their own words what’s going on in that paragraph. This is the moment when you leave your own mind, when you actually try to engage with someone’s ideas on their own terms. That’s a huge lesson to learn.

Edited and condensed from an interview conducted on Aug. 28, 2024.